


a promise made is a debt unpaid

by 01189998819991197253



Category: Marvel 616
Genre: Anal Sex, Angst, Asphyxiation, Battleworld (Marvel), Blood and Gore, Dark, Dark Magic, Dead Dove: Do Not Eat, Deviates From Canon, M/M, Mind the Tags, Murder, Ritual Public Sex, Serial Killers
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-11-06
Updated: 2019-11-06
Packaged: 2021-01-24 12:34:54
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,262
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/21338329
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/01189998819991197253/pseuds/01189998819991197253
Summary: Someone's murdering people on Battleworld, and Doom's favorite sheriff Stephen is on the case. But mindwipes can't hide old sins, and old sins cast long shadows. Some debts come due, even when you don't remember them. Justice is always key in Battleworld.
Relationships: Stephen Strange/Victor von Doom
Comments: 4
Kudos: 14





	a promise made is a debt unpaid

**Author's Note:**

  * For [the_casual_cheesecake](https://archiveofourown.org/users/the_casual_cheesecake/gifts).

> HAPPY BIRTHDAY CAKE! SORRY THIS IS LATE. ILU.
> 
> MIND THE TAGS, DEAR READER! DON'T LIKE; DON'T READ. THANK YOU.

There is a stench of magic at the scene.

Stephen doesn't recognize the signature of the scent; there's a chemical tang to it he can't name. It feels like he should be able to identify it, its title is on the tip of his tongue, but it slips away when he tries to form it into actual sounds. His guesses disintegrating into cracked pieces of fetal words that will never be born.

The woman's body on the ground below him is torn in two, her insides sprawled out so her ripped and ruined organs resemble tentacles, like the bisected intestines are fronds reaching out to pull both pieces back together.

There's a taste of blood at the back of his mouth that intensifies when Stephen finds no witnesses, no clues.

Murder, on Doom's sacred lands.

Murder, and not a suspect in sight.

* * *

"You seem unsettled, my sheriff," Doom's voice rumbles.

He takes Stephen as he usually does. Stephen stands, feet planted wide apart, clutching the stone balustrade with his ruined hands as best as he can.

Doom likes to have him here, where anyone can see. Stephen thinks he should be horrified; Doom's palace has its visitors, pilgrims making their treks to worship their god, to make thanks for his bountiful generosity. Doom doesn't even pause, waving at them kindly while he continues to thrust into Stephen's trembling body.

Stephen is not unwilling. Doom is a generous lover, even if his desire to take Stephen in public might not be Stephen first choice. Stephen's inclinations are more possessive. If it were up to Stephen, Doom would take him on silk sheets, in a grand canopy bed, no witnesses but Doom's intense stare.

Instead he's naked, feet spread wide, ruined hands trying and failing to clutch on cold stone, and Doom's fucking him rhythmically, silent but for the slap of flesh on flesh. When Stephen comes untouched, Doom's talented cock finding his prostate with unerring regularity, Doom fucks onward, ruthlessly taking his own pleasure in Stephen's body.

Stephen isn't silent; he lays his cheek against the stone balustrade and whimpers in time with Doom's thrusts.

After Doom has spilled inside Stephen, and admired the way his come looks like when it's dropping out of Stephen's abused hole and down his bare legs, they retire inside.

Doom doesn't touch his face normally, but this time, he cups Stephen's cheek as soon as they're hidden from view by his chamber curtains.

"Justice escapes no one in Doom's territory," Doom promises. "You'll find the perpetrator and they'll pay."

Stephen nods. Doom is right. Doom is always right.

* * *

The next day, Stephen finds a new body, rendered into six exact parts. Arranged on a hillside in a circle. Some sort of ritual gone wrong.

Magic, Stephen thinks. He's sure of it. The body is torn too exactly for human hands to manage. He runs every diagnostic he can think of. They all come back blank.

It's impossible.

Stephen's distracted by it during that night's taking. Doom is as perfunctory as always, fucking Stephen until he spills inside him, but he does freeze for a moment when he notices Stephen's cock is limp and decidedly unspent.

Doom seems to take it as an insult; he pushes Stephen against the doorframe and rubs Stephen's cock into hardness there in the doorway, still in open view. Doom's grip is warm and unrelenting until Stephen hardens and spills, over himself and over Doom's cloak.

Stephen is always naked when they're together. Doom never is. That's how Doom likes it.

"You'll solve this, my sheriff," Doom says, before tersely sweeping away, leaving Stephen standing there, confusedly staring after his master, come cooling on his stomach in the cold night breeze.

* * *

Stephen wakes up in a copse that isn't familiar to him. There's blood on his hands. He blinks, confused.

When he stumbles out of the trees it's to the sight of another body, displayed on a pathway like a cat leaving prey for its owner. It's a young girl. Her hands are folded across her chest. Her legs are forty paces away.

Stephen throws up into the bushes. He doesn't understand.

* * *

Stephen tries to tell Doom he doesn't deserve his blessings that night, but Doom strips him and pushes him out to the balcony. Displays him as always. Makes Stephen widen his stance until Stephen's presented to him as intimately as one of the broken bodies.

Fourteen bodies now, in fourteen days. Stephen's falling apart and that's before Doom takes him. There's a small crowd down in Doom's garden. Staring up like there's nothing wrong. They look so alive. Stephen's groin tightens. He spills so hard his come drips to the garden below, an offering to the grass.

* * *

Stephen finds one victim on a cliff, the naked body displayed to Johnny Storm's blazing form, fixed up in the sky. Turned into a star in punishment. He must have done something unforgivable. Doom’s punishments are always just.

That night, Stephen stares up at the black sky, wondering where Storm goes when he's not blazing nova.

* * *

Another body is a pile of pieces, lying on the steps to Doom's palace, one part on one step.

Stephen closes his eyes as Doom thrusts into him. He thinks Doom kisses his spine that night, just once, a comfort.

Another, and then, and another, and then—

* * *

Stephen wakes up mid-murder. The man's already dead and Stephen's hands are in the corpse's chest, wrist deep.

He knows then. He _knows_. It's him. It's him.

Magic leaves a mark, every user has a signature. Stephen’s has always held a hint of formalin and bleach. That's the chemical he couldn't name, that had lingered on every scene. Stephen's magic has always smelled like death and now he knows why.

Stephen cleans himself up and panics. He strips himself and showers under boiling water. That's why he can't find the magical signature of the murderer. _You can never see your own._ He laughs into his ruined hands until he cries and then he re-dresses like he's walking to his execution. He very well may be.

He deserves to be.

As he walks to Doom's chamber, he expects his lord to know everything immediately, but Doom strips him and takes him as usual, claiming Stephen as his own. Stephen's quiet all the way through this time, even as his orgasm splits through him, like a flower bursting open inside all his secrets.

Doom is supposed to know everything and he does not know this.

Stephen doesn't know whether to laugh or cry.

* * *

It can't last forever, and it doesn't.

Strange investigates more efficiently, now he knows it's him. He watches a magical reconstruction of all the murders. Sees a vision of himself, his eyes turning red. He doesn't remember committing the murders, but it's incontrovertible proof they were all done by his own hands.

* * *

Doom finds out, because Doom had to. He's the one to snap Stephen out of his final catatonic murderous state. Stephen comes to with Doom's hands around his wrist and Doom's eyes locked on his, his fortieth victim running away, unharmed.

There's pain in Doom’s eyes where Stephen's only ever seen glory and success before.

"I don't know why I'm doing this," Stephen says.

Doom's silent as he leads him back to the palace and up to his chamber. Stephen doesn't understand what's happening, as Doom washes his hands and strips him, almost gently. Then Doom steps back, looking him up and down.

"I could give you your memories back," Doom says. It's the first time Stephen's heard anything but pure certainty in Doom's voice.

Stephen stares at him, hope and despair warring in his chest.

Doom adds, "It would be kinder not to."

Stephen stares at him hollowly. "Since when was kindness your trademark?"

Doom laughs, bitter. "Since I first took you as my own, perhaps," he says, but then he nods, and relents. He touches a single finger to Stephen's temple.

Stephen remembers.

* * *

The blood bible, the blu'dakorr, demands forty souls and the caster's own.

In his memories, Stephen's standing, being judged, found wanting. His plea is refused, because Stephen's been in magical and soul debt for longer than anyone can really count.

Can't pay with your soul if you don't have one.

He remembers slinking away, devastated. But then he remembers someone else, a dark figure in a corner, beckoning him over, whispering to him about his debts.

If Stephen doesn't mind being in debt—clearly he doesn't—there are those who would be willing to be patient.

Stephen can still use the blu'dakorr. They'll simply take the price at a later date, that's all.

* * *

Stephen's memories continue to unfold. He's either laughing or crying as they spill out. Either way, the taste is rightfully bitter.

* * *

He's now remembering the days he spent considering the offer carefully, the threat of the incursions looming over every equation.

There's no recorded case of someone using the blu'dakorr and surviving.

Stephen laughs at how his past self thought he knew what that meant. He’d played all the moral dilemmas in his head. Forty lives for the good of the many. That was worth it, by any math.

But magic fools you. Magic never takes what it promises it will take.

Magic always takes more than you expect.

* * *

The spell to activate the blood bible is exact and humiliating, in the way magic of this magnitude should be. Stephen strips under the moonlight, reeling in his senses because he needs full focus. He takes the container of warm blood (lamb’s blood, of course) and starts to anoint his body as best as he can. He thinks his hands would be shaking even if they weren’t damaged.

He looks up at the sky. There’s no other Earth there yet, looming near and pregnant in the sky. But he can’t wait. It’s inevitable. He needs to prepare now, so he can use the final words of the spell when he needs them.

This pre-ritual is an intent. An opening clause. A wound that will rip a little more every day, until he speaks the final words and lets the magic free.

Forty lives. Forty mothers, forty fathers, forty children? Forty murderers, forty villains, forty heroes. Forty people he’s never met, or forty friends. There’s no way to know who the spell will take and still, Stephen has made as much peace with that as he can. There’ll be a personal cost, but even that can’t measure up against the fate of an entire planet.

There’ll be forty families he’ll have to add to the long list of people he’s wronged.

Forty holes in the tapestry of the world.

The math, the math, the math, he thinks. Forty lives and one blackened soul. Worth it. It has to be worth it.

The lamb’s blood is cooling. Stephen pours it over his hands, anoints the rest of his body as the ritual requires, painting his face, his chest, his cock. He speaks the words and invites the power in.

He'll pay for this, but not today. Not before he can use the magic. The spell is nestled inside him now, ready to be released by a chant, whenever he needs it most.

Stephen only just finishes the ritual before he's seen. He ends up running from a park ranger, barefoot, naked and covered in blood. He barely escapes being arrested for public indecency. He wonders at the time whether that embarrassment is part of the cost he's due to pay.

Past Stephen is naive like that.

* * *

Stephen's still sobbing as he comes out of his memories. Doom stands there, silent, unmoving.

That's it, then. One terrible miracle, paid for unknowingly in full. His debtors waited until Doom remade him and Stephen had a soul again. And then they took it from him, piece by piece. The forty lives due in payment were taken by Stephen's own hands, his newfound soul slipping away with it.

All debts paid.

It's over.

Stephen realizes that's what he's saying out loud. It's over. It's over. It's over.

"No," Doom says, "no."

Doom leads him outside and pushes him down. and when Doom fucks into him, Stephen's mouth falls open on his "_oh_", because of course, the day isn't over until this part of their daily routine is done. As spells are begun with ritual, so must they end.

"I despise the sensation of sympathy," Doom says, "but I am sorry, Stephen."

Stephen shakes his head, because sympathy isn't what he needs right now. There is something he needs. Doom's thrusts stay even and deep. His own climax approaches in crescendo, a buzzing in Stephen's skull he can't shake.

"You are precious to me," Doom whispers, and deviates from the normal.

Doom doesn't normally touch him, not his face; Stephen's eyes sting as both of Doom's hands move from Stephen's hip to his chin. Doom's thrusts increase in speed. That's a deviation to the norm.

Doom's hands slips lower, find his neck, and his fingers interlock.

"But you took forty of my people," Doom says.

Doom's fingers push and press down.

"And I must avenge their loss."

The world goes hazy. The fortieth death is his own, Stephen thinks. He didn’t see that detail coming. It’s almost a blessing, but isn’t that Doom’s way?

"Justice escapes no one in Doom's territory," Doom whispers. "Even you, my sheriff."

Doom speaks _my sheriff_ like someone else might say _my love._ Stephen's giddy at that thought, because Doom's been saying it that way all along.

They're the last words Stephen hears.


End file.
